Director, Software Engineering

Job Description

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Our CNN Platforms team is looking for a Director, Software Engineering to lead several critical pillars of our CNN.com and CNN app digital experiences - Data Privacy, Site Performance & Accessibility, and Design Systems. The CNN Platforms team builds, operates, and optimizes our digital content platform to empower journalists and product teams to drive essential, sustainable, and facts-first storytelling. Our focus areas include the content management system powering our CNN editorial experiences, content distribution to internal systems and external partners, media management for assets, website and app performance, data privacy and governance, and our core CNN design system.
This is a fantastic opportunity for a technology leader who's passionate about user-first product development and wants to make a meaningful impact at scale. You'll play a key role in ensuring that our CNN.com and CNN app digital experiences are trustworthy, fast, inclusive, and visually consistent for millions of users around the world.
As the engineering steward of these core areas, you'll collaborate with our product, design, program management, and legal partners to:
• Champion privacy-forward features that earn and maintain user trust
• Drive performance optimizations to keep our site and apps lightning fast
• Lead accessibility improvements so our platforms serve everyone
• Evolve our design systems to create consistent, intuitive, and beautiful user interfaces for CNN experiences and internal systems
Your Role Accountabilities...
Technical Leadership:
• Lead architecture and implementation of core tools and integrations supporting user consent flows, data privacy, performance monitoring, and design systems.
• Champion the evolution of scalable, extensible, and secure technical frameworks powering CNN's platform experiences.
• Partner cross-functionally with Engineering leaders to embed these capabilities into rendering workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and internal observability systems.
• Engage in high-level roadmap planning, feature prioritization, and cross-functional delivery updates to ensure alignment across the CNN organization.
Team Management & Mentorship:
• Lead, mentor, and grow multiple teams of software engineers and managers, fostering a culture rooted in collaboration, innovation, and ownership.
• Champion engineering excellence through best practices, high-quality code standards, and efficient developer workflows.
• Oversee architectural design reviews and maintain active involvement in code quality through hands-on review contributions.
Collaboration & Communication:
• Collaborate closely with CNN product, program, and design teams to evaluate technical feasibility, enhance the developer experience, and deliver impactful product features to boost user engagement and retention.
• Align with DevOps, QA, Legal, Privacy, and WBD partner teams on infrastructure planning, testing strategies, and compliance with legal and privacy standards.
• Partner with Engineering leadership across CNN and broader WBD organizations to drive technology strategy, identify consolidation opportunities, and promote cross-team knowledge sharing.
Qualifications & Essentials...
• Proven experience (10+ years) in a software engineering leadership role within Data Privacy, Site Performance & Accessibility, and/or Design Systems.
• Strong experience (3+ years) managing and scaling high-performance engineering teams, with focus on mentorship, team development, and inclusive culture.
• Deep knowledge of modern web and mobile application architecture, with an emphasis on frontend development, UI/UX practices, and responsible user data management.
• Extensive experience in server architecture, cloud computing (AWS), backend services design and integration, and content management systems.
• Proficient in programming languages including Node.js, Go, JavaScript, and other relevant languages.
• Hands-on experience with DevOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and deployment strategies for web, mobile, and connected TV platforms.
• Extensive experience with legal and privacy regulations including GDPR, CCPA, CPRA, COPPA, PECR, consent management, and data governance.
• Deep expertise in site and app performance optimization, leveraging Core Web Vitals and page/screen loading strategies for fast, reliable user experiences.
• Strong background in developing and scaling design systems, with practical experience using Figma and building tools/scripts to translate design tokens into reusable code.
• Excellent communication, leadership, and team-building skills with the ability to align engineering initiatives to product and business goals.
Nice to haves...
• Experience working in news, media, or content-driven digital technology with understanding of unique challenges in fast-paced editorial environments.

Championing Inclusion at WBD
Warner Bros. Discovery embraces the opportunity to build a workforce that reflects a wide array of perspectives, backgrounds and experiences. Being an equal opportunity employer means that we take seriously our responsibility to consider qualified candidates on the basis of merit, without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, mental or physical disability, and genetic information, marital status, citizenship status, military status, protected veteran status or any other category protected by law.
If you're a qualified candidate with a disability and you require adjustments or accommodations during the job application and/or recruitment process, please visit our accessibility page for instructions to submit your request.

Jobcode: Reference SBJ-bxxq7o-216-73-216-69-42 in your application.